Bad Disney
Plus Palestinian parkour, the weirdness of milk, a cough syrup summer, and more
This week at Public Seminar, our authors offer not takes but double takes.
Katie Pruden reviews Natasha Stagg’s new novel, Grand Rapids, in which the “downtown New York” author travels back in time to a Midwestern city where an Alexander Calder sculpture is regarded as an “eyesore.”
“I was really interested in bringing a trans perspective to milk and kind of approaching it with a certain level of ambivalence.” Megan Milks sits down with Cleo Levin to discuss Mega Milk, their portrait-in-essays exploring and challenging American dairy and all its associations.
Vicky Osterweil examines how Walt Disney’s “reflexive conservatism soured into “frothing anti-communism.” Osterweil writes: “In his folksy and avuncular way, Walt Disney contributed to Taft-Hartley and the end of the classical workers’ movement in America.”
“He told me, ‘If I were able to go out and come back to Gaza, I would never stop living in Gaza.’” Documentarian Areeb Zuaiter speaks with Rida Chaudhry about collaborating with parkour athletes in Gaza to make a film about giving genocide the middle finger.
And Julia Foulkes imagines what might happen if José Clemente Orozco’s portraits of Vladimir Lenin, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Sarojini Naidu, and other revolutionaries had the opportunity to talk back.
Think Happy Thoughts
Vicky Osterweil
While his politics grew more unhinged and hateful, [Disney’s] creative output turned definitively toward the production of nostalgia. Song of the South’s re-envisioning of plantation childhood was one particularly egregious example, as was Peter Pan’s shocking image of Indigenous life in “What Made the Red Man Red?” But this aesthetic was perhaps most clearly embodied in his televised Disneyland show on ABC, where he cemented his image as avuncular friend of America’s children, and in Main Street, USA, the entry point of his new theme park, Disneyland.
The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour
Rida Chaudhry and Areeb Zuaiter
Areeb Zuaiter: It all started in 2014, when there was a really serious offensive happening against Gaza. It was 50-plus days of continuous shelling. Nothing compared to what we’ve seen recently during the genocide, but it was unbearable to watch. … I was following the news, specifically on YouTube, and this clip pops up on my feed of young men doing acrobatic moves and challenging this colossal bombing in the background.
Some Random Person in Grand Rapids
Katie Pruden
The novel opens mid-scene to an episode of Grosse Income, a reality TV show about “the wealthy and the washed-up” in a Midwestern town. Tess is glued to the screen because the show features the much older man, a local politician, with whom she has been having an online relationship for months. Tess explains, “It was the first time someone I personally knew was on television.”
![A plastic cup of milk with a design that reads “I [image of a red heart] MILK”](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!a11d!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9410e59f-d722-41d4-aee5-e3157b208c82_1024x577.jpeg "A plastic cup of milk with a design that reads “I [image of a red heart] MILK”")
What’s Fresh, White, and Read All Over?
Cleo Levin and Megan Milks
Megan Milks: I am a writer who tends to go straight to the discomfort. The things that were uncomfortable then as a kid, they definitely seemed ripe for exploration in this book as a writer. I say that, but at the same time, the essay on lactation, “The Letdown: Lactation Suite,” that was one of the last things I wrote for the book because I was, I don’t know, I guess I was reluctant to get into it. To get into my relationship to breasts and nipples and tits and also my relationship to my mom and breastfeeding and chestfeeding and all of that stuff. I mean, even as I’m using this language, I’m a little uncomfortable.
If These Walls Could Talk
Julia Foulkes
Lenin: Revolution does not walk. It rises as a wave. The proletariat throwing off the chains of capitalism to overthrow the bourgeoisie. First in one country, then around the world.
Stalin: Waves and chains? You’re mixing your metaphors again, Vladimir. How naïve, all of you. Ideas need to be controlled, managed.